A debate was held earlier this week at the IAB with the very intention of coming up with a definitive answer to the question “Are apps more important than mobile sites?” The article on the IAB website can be found here.
Well, to summarise the findings… At the start of the debate 58% disagreed with the motion and by the end of the debate that figure had risen to 87%. However I do think that the wording made this an inherently pointless debate as the findings were, quite obviously, that you should have both.
A much more interesting debate would have been “which of the two channels is more important?” That way you would have had to choose one or the other, and my money would have been on apps quite frankly. I would be interested to see what the panel thought of this.
Some of the statistics are staggering. Jon Mew, head of mobile at the IAB, introduced the proceedings by outlining some key statistics to highlight the popularity of iPhone apps in particular. Mew pointed out that there are now 115,000 iPhone apps for sale in the Apple app store and 2.4bn have been downloaded, meaning that more people have downloaded an app than own a TV. And, citing figures from acrossair, they demonstrated that the iPhone is the fastest growing technology product ever!
